Caravan of Thieves

by David Rich

  Was I going there to save him? I knew better. Did I want to save him? Save him from the people whose stolen money he stole, or save him from jail? I kept struggling to figure out what the mission was, and I didn’t like getting closer to my destination without the slightest idea what to do when I arrived. He was hiding out, which meant he did not need a warning. Help him get away? To where?

  I should have learned my lesson in Afghanistan: know the goal before you begin the mission. The desert on either side of the highway stayed quiet, patient, and blank for hours, as if waiting for me to supply an answer. But the patience was a trap. I just kept traveling deeper into the darkness, which felt more like a gaping maw than a tunnel that might have an end, all the while yammering to myself to help avoid facing the truth. Flashes of Afghanistan came to mind, mixing with flashes of Dan.

  For some reason, I’m good at picking up languages, a skill I was unaware I possessed until I got to Afghanistan. Speaking Spanish was just a survival skill where I grew up. Maybe Dari and Pashto fall into the same category now. I learned a little Dari in my first weeks, but the best lessons came when I went along to the shura, the meetings with tribal leaders. They and our captain spoke and the translators went to work. Before long, I didn’t need the translator, though, of course, I didn’t let anyone know that. My job was to listen anyway. It was pleasant to sit there drinking tea and sussing out the distrust and wariness and fake sincerity on both sides. Sometimes I would imagine Dan sitting there, telling stories like the pro he was, pausing as if to allow his hosts to beg him to continue but really just to figure what came next, and all the while working on partnerships, alliances, new ventures. The Afghans distrusted pointless conversations with strangers but relished anyone who could convey his points by what he didn’t say, by the pauses and change of direction. To visit them without a plan and a goal was more than disrespect; it was a form of betrayal, as if the point of the meeting was to waste their time. And that meant their allegiances would find other attachments. They wanted every word to hold a clue, a hint, an evasion. They would have loved Dan—even though all the while that he spun his web, he would be working out how he could sell off his end of those same deals before he had to deliver. Because when Dan was telling a story, he was delivering all he ever could.

  It started with a tap on the back while I was in Helmand Province in the southern part of Afghanistan. I turned to find an Afghan staring into my eyes and looking entirely pleased with himself. There was a problem with that. If an Afghan sneaks up on you and you live, then your nose is defective and you should have it checked because those people smell. They smell bad until you get used to it, then they just smell distinctive. No running water for most of them so showers are scarce. Outside the cities, washing machines are as rare as mink coats. I’m sure Afghans can sneak up on each other and we smell bad to them, or at least distinctive, but it’s not something I’ve ever discussed with one of them. This guy didn’t smell.

  After three days of trading fire, we had finally shoved the Taliban from Deshu and a jittery exhaustion settled over us. I was in the market, inviting a sandal maker to tea so he could tell us where the caches of rifles and ammunition were buried, when we were interrupted. I turned quickly to face the Afghan, who had his hands out to show he wasn’t armed. He spoke Dari with a strange accent, asking to speak to me privately. I checked with the sandal man for his reaction; he backed away. Something was wrong. I answered in Dari and we moved away from the market to a residential part of town where there had been heavy fighting. No one lived there at that moment. The residents and the fighters were gone: fled or dead. The bodies had been cleared out, but the damage wouldn’t be repaired for a long time. I stayed a step behind him and kept my weapon ready. Nobody showed any signs of knowing him, so he wasn’t local, which might explain the strange accent. I kept speaking to him in Dari, trying to get a fix. He turned down a small lane. No one else was in sight. I hesitated, and he looked back and told me, in Dari, to stay close. I answered in English: “Where the hell are we going?”

  He answered in Dari, saying I should come along and he didn’t understand English.

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “You speak Dari with a Texas accent.”

  “Arkansas,” he said. He walked over to a house where the door was still intact and I followed him inside. I recognized the place because just two days before I had helped clear it. The residents opened the door, bags in hand. They didn’t want a fight and they didn’t want the place wrecked.

  He made tea by boiling the leaves rather than steeping them. That was fine in some parts of Afghanistan, but he didn’t have any sugar or hard candies to go with it so it was going to be really bitter. He was showing off his native skills for me; I just wanted to see his face when he tasted the stuff. We sat on the cushions in the main room. “I’m Captain Derek Ballard, Second Marines, First Brigade. I’ve been seconded to the Counterintelligence and Humint Center at the Defense Intelligence Agency. We were told you speak Dari and Pashto.”

  “I’m learning.”

  “Tough languages, but you’re going to have to learn fast.”

  Captain Ballard was an earnest, serious little guy who got right to the point. I found it difficult to trust him. The Afghans never acted that way and never trusted anyone who did. He acted as if he were telling you everything, which probably was not true, and if it were, he was in a lot of trouble anyway. Captain Ballard laid out the mission: our weapons were ending up in the hands of the Taliban; intelligence had determined that they were disappearing after entering the country via the overland caravans from Karachi; everything was checked through customs properly.

  Something was going wrong after that.

  The captain would go to Torkham, the entry point on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass, posing as a broker wanting to purchase weapons; I was to go to Karachi and get hired to ride along in a truck as a security man and attempt to find suspects among the drivers and other security people.

  “Aren’t they all suspects?” I said.

  “We have a name. Nawaz Mazari.”

  “Who are we after, Captain?”

  Captain Ballard frowned and his neck moved forward to emphasize his seriousness. He wasn’t an Afghan trader or anything like one anymore. He was an angry officer. It didn’t take much to strip him down. “You will travel with the caravan and ingratiate yourself with people you think might be involved in stealing arms from our supplies. When you cross the border at Torkham, you will find me and introduce me to these people. You’ll attempt to broker a deal. My cover is Abdullah from Kandahar. Understood?”

  I understood this was a plan that was not going to work. I wanted to ask him if he thought this plan up himself or if the real geniuses at headquarters pissed on it, too. First, if I could make Abdullah as a Marine then everyone in Torkham would be whistling the Marine Corps hymn whenever he appeared. Second, it would take months and many runs on the caravan to establish trust. The best way would be to wave a lot of cash around and get some entrepreneurial fellow to steal a few weapons on his own and hope that caught of the attention of the organization that ran the pilfering.

  “I understand,” I said. “It will take me a few weeks to grow my beard enough. I can use that time to improve my language skills.”

  “You start in two days.”

  “No beard, no me, Captain. I’m not going on a suicide run. Court-martial me if you want.” Not every Afghan wears a beard, but every American doesn’t. If having one gained me five minutes of doubt in someone’s mind, I wanted one.

  He squinted his eyes at me and stood up and paced around with his chest puffed out. “You will pay for that outburst, Lieutenant. This operation has been in the planning for months.”

  “Use the time to dirty yourself up, Captain, maybe have a couple of teeth pulled. I’ll go along, starting in three weeks.” He was not happy to be challenged, but he agreed.

  I traveled to headquarters in Kabul to get the details about Karachi and the caravan. Major Carl
Jenkins looked like a schoolteacher: glasses, a mustache, the first hint of a comb-over. He met Ballard and me outside NATO headquarters and ushered us past the gates and the guards. Ballard was wearing his shalwar kameez and swept through as if he thought he were Lawrence of Arabia returning to Cairo. I thought he looked like a foolish adult dressing up for a Halloween party at the country club.

  Major Jenkins gave me seed money: one hundred crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills. I told him I needed twenty more. Ballard was always ready: “Why?”

  “Because a villager from the south would not have American money in this condition. I’m going to have to go into the market-place and change it and I’m going to have to lose a little bit on each transaction.”

  “Not a problem,” Jenkins said. He seemed to have some experience at this. We talked about communication. There was not going to be any. The meeting seemed about to end. We all stood up. Jenkins came around his desk, and Ballard moved toward the door. I stood still.

  “Once the caravan crosses the border into Afghanistan, Americans are in charge. Are we looking for American soldiers?” Ballard stared at me for an answer. This was the moment to run away, go AWOL, disappear. I knew just the right cave for it, but it was in Arizona, and I doubted I could make it there before being caught. Too late it occurred to me that if my Afghan act was good, I had a better chance of getting there in that disguise. “Then it could be anyone. It could be Major Jenkins.”

  “It’s not me.”

  “Or his commanding officer.”

  “That’s enough, Lieutenant.”

  “Stop it. Both of you.” That stunned us. Neither of us had thought Jenkins had enough starch to give orders. “It’s not my commanding officer. He never leaves the office. At least no one has ever seen him outside it. As the captain says, this is the mission. These are your orders.”

  “You will meet me when you cross the border and vouch for me to the right people.”

  Hi, Nawaz, I’d like you to meet my old friend Abdullah of Arkansas. He’s the one over there wearing the American flag.

  “We’re going to find these guys and bust them. I promise,” said Ballard, now that it was his turn to talk to himself. Major Jenkins studied his shoes. Maybe he wanted to see if they were laced right.

  8.

  The marina at Hite’s Landing on Lake Powell opened just after dawn. The sun splashed against the cliffs across the lake and bounced onto the water. “Ain’t got no tackle,” said the old man running the boat rentals.

  “Going to meet friends. They’ve already been out two days.”

  He seemed to believe it. Maybe he just cared about the question. I counted out the cash for the boat rental and the deposit and the gas. I drove aimlessly around the lake a few times to see if I had any watchers, then cruised out north.

  Dan was where I expected to find him. He was alone this time and had his clothes on, thankfully. I was the biggest thing on the plateau overlooking the houseboat, and I couldn’t crawl under my own shadow to cool off. The heat was bothering me, but it shouldn’t have, so maybe it was more than the heat. Dan spent some time fixing an awning. Then the shadows from the plateau fell over the boat and I started down.

  He must have seen me coming and hidden. The boat was about forty feet, white, with a roof deck. It rested on two aluminum pontoons. A rubber raft with a small outboard was tethered to the stern and pulled up onto the beach. The boat was called Not Home. First I stepped into the water and walked all around the boat. I decided that calling out for Dan would only make him suspicious. He might think it was a warning or that I was being forced to call.

  Inside, the boat was clean and well kept. The wood cabinetry was still in good shape. The galley had a small refrigerator and a gas stove and a table where four people could sit if they crammed in close to each other. Two heads. A large bed where Dan slept, and another bedroom with two beds, and a bunk in the passageway, all made up. Aft was a lounge with blue cushions around the sides. There was a box of cigars, Fuentes, on the counter. I took one and grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge and went outside to enjoy the shade.

  I heard him before I saw him. “Rollie Boy, there’s no one on this glorious earth I’d rather see sitting in my chair, drinking my beer and smoking my cigars.” He came into view, walking along the beach carrying a Winchester Model 70 hunting rifle, low at his side. His hair was thick and white, like a politician’s, which should have been a hint to anyone who paid attention, and it accentuated the deep brown tan he had. He climbed aboard the aft ladder, set the rifle against the rail, and held out his arms. “Damn coyote’s been checking me out, thought I’d turn the tables on him,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. It was torture for me.” We hugged. “You have to tell me all about it. You look great. Great.”

  We settled down and agreed that we both looked great and the sky was blue, the sun was probably going to go down, and the stars were going to twinkle in the sky. Nobody asked anyone but himself what are you doing here? How did you get here? How do you plan to get out? At last Dan showed me where I could sleep. I checked out the ridgeline before bedding down and was astounded to see a coyote watching us.

  We fished and caught smallmouth bass all morning, enough to make me wonder how long I’d be there eating them, and that made me give in first. “Whose boat is this?”

  “Well, I could claim it for my own, but what for, since I get to use it as much as I like without the burdens of ownership.” Taxes and licenses and permits. “I knew this guy, big guy, maybe six four, sprout of curly dark hair, beanpole of a guy, had a little wife, tiny, barely five feet, very attractive woman she was, but she ran him ragged. It was funny to watch, painful but funny. She’d want him to check with her for permission to swallow his food. And ‘Buy me this, buy me that, take me to Hawaii, take me to France, send the kids to this special school.’ There weren’t enough hours in the day for this guy to make money at the rate she spent it. His name was Simon, by the way. Simon needed to get away sometimes but could never figure out a good plan until he took the family on a houseboat vacation on the lake here. He went off fishing one morning and came along to the rapids near the river mouth, and it started bothering him what was on the other side and how if he were on the other side, his wife couldn’t get to him. So he explored on foot and he thought and he planned and he scouted. He realized that if he could float a boat down here from upriver, it would make the perfect getaway. The problem was that his wife kept a close watch on every penny he made. Every time I talked to him he turned the subject back to the boat. He just couldn’t get that vision out of his head, like we all get about a woman sometimes. And it happened at the time I was planning a business venture that could use his accounting skills and he could earn the side money he needed to fulfill his dream and buy a little peace.… Now I’ve been talking and those fish stopped being hungry.”

  He stopped. It was to check on me, I think. To see if I was going to play my part properly. If not, that meant I was too distracted. I said, “But how did you end up with it?”

  “He owed me a little money at the end of things and said I could use the boat whenever I wanted to until he paid me back. I was the only other person in the world who knew he owned it or where it was. His wife never knew this boat existed. When he came up here, he told her he was visiting clients or going to a convention or whatever excuse he could sell her at the time. Over the years, I found it a pretty good place to relax. And he came up less and less until he stopped coming at all. I had moved on and lost touch with Simon. I asked around and found out he got sent to prison at Lompoc, so the next time I was nearby I went over to visit him. Terrible sight he was, too. Skinnier than ever and hair cut short. He shook his head and I could see that he just hated himself. It seems buying the boat wasn’t the only way he tried to find peace. His other try was with another woman, and he married her, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to divorce the first one first, and it wasn’t long before both wives found out and it turned out he ha
d married the same type twice. They got together on his finances and found that he had been working quite a few side ventures, some of which were profitable but on which he could not pay taxes because then his wives would have known about the money. Both wives had divorced him, of course, so he was really looking forward to the day he got out, and he made me swear to take good care of the boat until he could use it again.”

  “So you have it until he gets out?”

  “Poor Simon won’t be getting out. He had a heart attack a few months later and died. I didn’t think there was any need to go pointing out the boat to the ex-wives; they had pretty much bled him dry. And the government, hell…no offense.”

  People who just met Dan, people who didn’t know him, were really lucky because they could think they loved him when they heard him tell that story. For me, the part that stuck the most was the part he left out, the part of the conversation at Lompoc where Dan was checking to see if Simon had implicated him in any crimes.

  I knew it was my turn next. Dan would want to know the whole story, and I must have been brooding about how to go about it. We were silent. Then he said, “Do you think that means I stole this boat?” His tone was startling; he was sincere. I looked at him. His face had grown dark and his eyes were sharp and hard, as if he were staring but seeing things that weren’t there. The contrast with his face made his eyes seem like they were emitting light. “Do you?” I looked up at the sky to see if there were clouds making the light change, but, no, the sky was still blue.

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t steal it.”